Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Fenwick ·
The Streetlights That Give Evidence on Fenwick Quay
The lamps over the pub doors come down to a coal an hour before a quarrel is settled, and the best clock on the quay is kept to the lamps.
- status: folklore
Fenwick keeps six public houses and each of them has its lamp, one to a door, on a post the borough paints the same grey as the gull poles. The lamps belong to the borough. The borough lights them, trims them, and has them on a contactor off the substation by the ice store, and if the matter ended at the contactor there would be nothing on the quay to tell. It does not end at the contactor.
The lamps dim. Not fail — dim. They come down to a coal of themselves and hold there, steady, neither swinging nor guttering, and after one hour they come up again to their full white, and the door under them opens easy. The men of the quay are careful about the order of it, because the order is the whole of the evidence: first the lamp, then the hour, then the settling of the row. It has never gone settling first and lamp after. No one who has stood at the rails at closing time waiting for the light to come up will tell you different, and none of them will change his walk either.
The rows the lamps dim for are not only the rows of drink. The boat share at the Slip settled two winters back, and the lamp over the Slip door came down for it, though the row was argued at three houses and a chapel, and the lamp stood over a door none of the row had ever gone in by. A row with the water board, a row between brothers over netting, a widow and the parish over a gravestone: the lamps have come down for them all, and in every case what follows the hour is a settling — signed, paid, spoken, or given up — and nobody in Fenwick will name the hand that does the settling. Fury keeps its hour, then furious men are quiet, an hour after the coal.
Harold Meak keeps the Boat Inn, and his clock is the best clock on the quay. He corrected it to the Post Office pips for nine years and gave it up, and since the year of the ice store he corrects it to nothing at all, because the clock keeps to the lamps. The borough clock at the harbour office keeps to the pips in the ordinary way, and is wrong twice a year and always in the same directions, and the harbourmaster has learned to telephone the Boat before he signs anything timed.
The borough has tested the lamps twice — a man with a meter on a stick, a form with a tick, photocell drift suspected and then not found. The forms are kept at the town hall as evidence that nothing is amiss, and they are the only paper at Fenwick that says the lamps are only lamps. The quay does not argue with the town hall. The quay has the lamps.
It was the ice store year that quieted the doubters, and the story is told plain. The lamp over the Anchor came down on a raw Tuesday in February, an hour before closing, with nothing in the Anchor but dominoes and a round. Harold had the torch out and stood in the coal of light half his evening. At the hour, up it came, and in the same minutes a row was settled — one floor above the quay, in the harbour office, over the rent of the ice store, between men who had not been in the Anchor for a year. The lamp had not once-minded its own door.
You will hear the whole of it today at last orders, from the landlords, lamp against lamp, and from the men who refit the posts, who are borough men and would not say it on their rounds but say it off them. The lamps have never dimmed for a row that failed, and no row has settled at Fenwick without its hour under the coal. What is still asked over the towel rail, and not answered, is not whether the lamps give evidence. It is whose side they are on when they give it — the settling's, or the row's.